One of the greatest challenges facing many attendees is not having enough time to soak up all the rich content that a SIGGRAPH conference and exhibition has to offer. Now, you can get a glimpse into the incredibly robust experiences that will be featured at SIGGRAPH 2008 before you arrive in Los Angeles.

Download the SIGGRAPH 2008 Advance Program to find details about:

Featured speakers Ed Catmull, President, Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, Catherine Owens, Irish artist and film director, and Takeo Kanade, Professor of Computer Science and Robotics, and Director of the Quality of Life Technology Engineering Research Center, Carnegie Mellon University

SIGGRAPH 2008’s newly expanded Computer Animation Festival

Technical Papers, the premier international forum for disseminating new scholarly work in computer graphics

The SIGGRAPH 2008 Exhibition that showcases the latest products and services from more than 225 of the world’s premier vendors and exhibitors

SIGGRAPH 2008 Art and Design Galleries

The Studio, where you can interact with a variety of creative areas and technologies regardless of your skill level

Classes that feature a variety of CG topics and also how to grow your career and your company

FJORG!, the 32-hour international computer graphics “iron-animator” competition

The world’s newest and most innovative technologies, New Tech Demos, that you must experience to understand

Preview SIGGRAPH 2008 and register by 4 July to save up to $275 off the cost of registration.

In Wrestling with the Blob Beast, Johnson presents a collection of sixteen animated screensavers. Derived from painting, they cover a wide field, ranging from formal studies where color is a primary concern, to quiet nature scenes like a campfire at night, to vignettes where figure and abstraction appear to be in active battle, as in several pieces where hands appear to wrestle with paint which morphs into a dog’s face and then reverts to paint strokes. While the wrestling pieces serve as humorous metaphors for the sometimes arduous endeavor of painting, others suggest a more serene relationship, such as Fly, in which a tiny painted airplane inches across a wet, painted sky.

Johnson uses digital technology to record and assemble his animations, yet his imagery retains a low-tech, painterly feel, with the paintstrokes providing unexpected physicality in a medium where motion is typically video or computer-generated animation. For the artist, paint is his primary focus, with the animation serving less as the end rather than another means of looking at painting.

The artists’ first well-known work, “What Visions Burn” from 2006, was a 22-minute dvd which mixed painting and cinema in an entertaining and self-referential heist film. The brief looping scenes which comprise the screensavers for Wrestling with the Blob Beast continue Johnson’s painterly exploration of cinematic conventions while using animation to look a new possibilities in painting.

Ezra Johnson was born in 1975 in Wenatchee, Washington, and lives in Brooklyn. He received a BFA in painting from the California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco in 2000 and completed an MFA in painting in 2006 at Hunter College in New York City. During his MFA studies, he participated in an exchange program with the Universitat der Kunst in Berlin. His work has been shown at numerous exhibitions including solo gallery shows in New York, Los Angeles, and Torino, Italy. His first solo museum show was at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2007.

Since its inception, Dia has defined itself as a vehicle for the realization of extraordinary artists’ projects that might not otherwise be supported by more conventional institutions. To this end, it has sought to facilitate direct and unmediated experiences between the audience and the artwork. Beginning in early 1995, Dia initiated a series of artists’ projects for the web by commissioning projects from artists who are interested in exploring the aesthetic and conceptual potentials of this medium.

The archive contains works by Wilfredo Prieto, Maja Bajevic, Ana Torfs, Allen Ruppersberg, Marijke van Warmerdam, Glenn Ligon, Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, Jeanne Dunning, Shimabuku, James Buckhouse and Holly Brubach, Feng Mengbo, David Claerbout, Stephen Vitiello, Gary Simmons, Francis Alÿs, Diller + Scofidio, Kristin Lucas, Claude Closky, Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival), Cheryl Donegan, Molissa Fenley, Susan Hiller, Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, Constance DeJong + Tony Oursler + Stephen Vitiello.

Dia Art Foundation: A nonprofit institution founded in 1974, Dia Art Foundation is internationally renowned for initiating, supporting, presenting, and preserving art projects. Dia presents public programs and its permanent collection of works from the 1960s through the present at Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries, in New York’s Hudson Valley. In the fall of 2007 Dia initiated a partnership with The Hispanic Society of America in which Dia presents commissions and projects by contemporary artists in the Hispanic Society’s galleries. Dia is actively engaged in a search for a permanent home for its New York City initiatives. Additionally, Dia maintains long-term, site-specific projects in the western United States, in New York City, and in Bridgehampton on Long Island.

In 2008 the training will take place in Thessaloniki (Greece) and Sofia (Bulgaria) and will be available in three sessions:

- General Blender techniques, tips and tricks
- Media content for the web, e-Marketing, streaming techniques
- Advanced Blender techniques, external rendering engines, Python scripting

Deadline: April 10.

Each session has a participation fee of 1000 Euro, that covers the training and 6 days accommodation in Sofia, including coffee-breaks and lunches. Scholarships will be available.

Suna no Onna, adapted from Hiroshi Teshigahara’s mysterious 1960s cult movie, is a dance installation that merges virtual and real images of a life of existential entrapment in an inhospitable habitat. The ominous sand dunes of Teshigahara’s desert are transformed into virtual realities that shape the unconscious ground where the Woman (Katsura Isobe) meets a scientist-foreigner who stumbles into her life to become a captive.

The work combines dance, interactive video and animation, fashion design, electronic music and specially developed sensorial and interfacial garments (built with intelligent materials), which respond to movement qualities, energies and emotional gesture. Work originally was commissioned for the INTIMACY festival (LabanCentre / Goldsmiths) .

Conceived and directed by Johannes Birringer and Michele Danjoux, the stage production features new fashion concepts by Danjoux and digital designs by a group of collaborating artists including Paul Verity Smith, Doros Polydorou, Maria Wiener, and Jonathan Hamilton. Original music composed by Oded Ben-Tal, scenography by Hsueh-Pei Wang, and lighting design by Miguel Alonso.

Suna no Onna is performed by an international cast - Japanese dancer Katsura Isobe, British dancer Olugbenga Taiwo, and Chinese dancer Helenna Ren.

Last year I began my honors thesis, which is series of conceptually-based animations. As I investigated the history and process of animation, I decided to concentrate on animation as it is integrated with new technology. As a part of this series, inspired by a class called “computing in the wild”, I decided to use GPS technology.

Familiar with the work of C5 group, and the website gpsdrawing.com, which showcases drawings people make with their GPS units – elephants, snails, spiders, text, etc, I realized nobody had made an animation from these drawings, and that each drawing on the site could potentially be one frame of animation.

As far as the “wild” part of the “computing in the wild” class, we had a weekend planned at the White Mountain Research Station in which we would conduct our experiments. I liked the idea that walking these frames off in a remote location would be a performance in itself.

The shape of the animation was also shaped by the idea of a performance. The drawing was to be made from tracking a walk, so why not make the drawing be of what I was doing? Furthermore, the icon of animation itself is the walk cycle – precedented by Muybridge and made famous by Mickey Mouse. Also from a technical standpoint, walk cycles are relatively easy to make.

Finally, I knew about the Nazca geoglyphs and the Blythe geoglyph, the latter of which I could use as a template when I would go “into the wild.” I place “into the wild” in quotations, because I executed my first GPS animation in downtown San Diego, using the confines of the city grid as my guide.

This urban precedent really influenced my design and provided a pleasant contrast to the movements of my “natural” geoglyph. The urban walk cycle ended up resembling an Atari character, while the “natural” geoglyph was much more free-form and organic.” From EDGERIDERS: Christin Turner.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX6cR2_MHTI

Evolution of the Landscape Series by Christoph Kern. Sound: Jan Truetzschler.
Christoph Kern uses old master knowledge of the material of painting with almost scientific obsessiveness to ‘breed cubes’. In his investigations Christoph Kern follows different tracks: cubes imploding in space, gyrating in science – fiction - like structures that evoke connotations like Star Wars or Kubrick’s 2001. Or monolithic cubes that seem to all but eliminate pictorial space in their attempt to push towards and overflow the edges. And, most recently, a focus on futuristic landscapes that appear to have been generated by the cubes themselves, yet in which the cubes tend more towards dissolution.

Kern’s paintings are an accumulated history of their own making. The paintings are worked up in many layers, beginning with the initial scenario under investigation, setting the scene. With each progressive layer the cubes’ evolution, their growth, colour, position and movement in space as well as their relationship towards each other is traced, the positions at which they arrive are tested and pushed towards a point at which the image can rest. This stage is documented before the painting process continues. Pentimenti and animated films show the different stages of one painting’s transformation and are a way for the viewer to share in the painting’s evolution.

What makes Kern’s paintings powerful is that in the end the paintings generate meaning by evoking specific situations and depicting very particular worlds that seem utterly convincing, sometimes even familiar, even though they originate in the purely formal and abstract. — Nikola Irmer

States of Exchange: Artists from Cuba provides a dynamic and thought-provoking exploration of the complexities of economic and information exchange in contemporary Cuba. At a time when borderless communication is assumed to be the global norm, Cuba is a country caught in flux. With two legal currencies, minimal internet access, and divisions between those who can and can’t access external resources, the residents of Cuba have become experts at negotiating the complexities of exchange between each other and the world.

Curated by Cylena Simonds (Iniva) and prominent Cuban curator Gerardo Mosquera, the group show focuses on six artists living and working in Cuba today. Their work offers a witty and provocative response to scarcity and constraint, raising issues of global relevance. The artworks range from sculpture and performance to video installation, plus an extensive video screening programme featuring shorts and experimental documentaries by over 14 artists, including works never before seen in Europe.

Co-curator, Gerardo Mosquera says: ‘States of Exchange aims to show how artists in Cuba discuss contradictions, ambiguities and social negotiations in Cuban life, leading a critical culture that prevails in the country since the mid 80s. They use the semantic powers of art to create complex works whose impact goes far beyond the local context. So this is not a general show of Cuban art but a thematic exhibition on issues particular to Cuba. It includes both emerging artists that are beginning to be known internationally and more established ones.’

Works include:

Cuba’s complex system of economic exchange is summarised in Yoan Capote’s work Dinero Bilingüe (Bilingual Money, 2002), which splices together a peso with a US quarter – rendering both coins defunct. An elusive grasp of currency is also key to the video Pasatiempo (Dinero) (Pastime (Money), 2005) by Diana Fonseca in which two peso coins suddenly vanish leaving a dark stain on the artist’s hands.

Themes of censorship are explored in Jeannette Chávez’s video performance, Autocensura (Self-censorship, 2006), she painfully ties thread around her tongue and closes her lips, her self-inflicted silence becoming invisible. In Secreter (2000) Iván and Yoan Capote collaborate to create a means to share secrets via a giant rudimentary telephone reminiscent of a handmade children’s toy. In Wilfredo Prieto’s installation Speech (1999) we see rolls of toilet paper made entirely from Cuba’s official newspaper, Granma.

Using red beans to represent people, Lázaro Saavedra’s video animations La gloria borra la memoria (Glory erases memory, 2006) and El que no sabe es como el que no ve (Not knowing is like not seeing, 2006) succinctly dramatise the tension between the official representations of life in Cuba and the actual experiences of Cubans. A sense of dreaming and longing is evoked in Cambio de Estado (Change of State, 2006) in which Chávez covers a ceiling with starred military epaulettes to create constellations reflecting the night sky of the area in which the work is displayed.

Accompanying the exhibition there is a full-colour bilingual catalogue. There is also a lively education and events programme including music, talks by the curators’ and discussions with artists.

States of Exchange: Artists from Cuba is an Iniva exhibition at Rivington Place in Barclays Project Space and Project Space 2. The project has been realised with thanks to Arts Council England.

Antarctic Animation is the site of inquiry. Water freezing and melting - with Christine McMillan and Jack Colwell - bridges the fields of Visual Art, Movement Improvisation and Data Visualisation. Animations are being made through human movement, drawing, writing, sound and assemblage, in response to scientific data and poetic texts of Antarctic expeditioners. Animations are revealing cycles and transformations that have been observed and experienced in the Antarctic landscape. Drawing the Antarctic landscape to human scale through human gesture allows for profound connections to be made with changes. There are more animations here, and a blog, maps, and much more on the site.